Don't Keep in Touch

A poignant article in the blog "Life After Jerusalem" prompts us to expand upon something we wrote in our last posting.

In that article, the author, who identifies herself as "Digger," eulogizes a friend and former colleague, who died en route to his workday at an American Embassy where he and Digger both used to work. The colleague, a forty-year veteran of U.S. Government service, was a Foreign Service National employee of our embassy.

FSN employees are host-country nationals who work for the American government, often showing incredible dedication to our government and to America.

Many have stood by us in the face of strong and sometimes violent opposition to American policies or influence.

Some have been arrested by their host countries for their association with the US government, or harassed by host-country intelligence services for their refusal to betray the United States.

A significant number have lost their lives in the service of our country, some targeted and killed specifically for being employees of an American embassy.

In at least two cases I can think of, Afghanistan and Guinea Bissau, an FSN caretaker was for a while essentially the sole "American" presence in our embassy, the sole protector of our property in a dangerous country from which we had evacuated.

One of the joys and privileges of Foreign Service life is getting to know and work with these people. And frankly, I can think of a great many FSOs who, if truth be told, learned most of their professional skills from the experienced FSN staff at their first posts of assignment.

Many FSOs stay in touch with their FSN former colleagues, usually through the exchange of friendly email correspondence, once in a while. Some send pictures, some send birthday cards, and FSOs who find themselves in Washington (including some very high-level members of Senior management) often host former FSN colleagues for a dinner or a weekend event when the FSNs visit Washington for training or business.

Most FSOs do this, and think absolutely nothing negative about it.

And why should they?

FSNs are trusted employees of the government, and go through a sort of basic security clearance procedure both before being hired and periodically throughout their careers. It is not the same clearance procedure that FSOs go through, but intelligence and other agency namechecks are done, police records searched, and annual interviews conducted.

FSNs are not trusted with our highest secrets, but they are trusted with personnel information, large sums of money, consular information and equipment, and many other things. Some FSNs routinely sit in on highest-level negotiations, others are involved in military to military interactions and security-related matters.

Many immigrate to the US after retiring. Most of those become American citizens, and a few have actually gone on to have Foreign Service careers of their own.

They are not all angels, of course. Some do get fired. But word gets out fast when an FSN loses his or her job, and those are not the ones FSOs stay in contact with. In general, FSNs who have been caught doing something bad disappear from our employ very fast, and often go to jail.

So most FSOs never think twice about their continuing relationships with FSN employees who continue to work in our embassies.

We do. We are aware of at least three recent cases, one resulting in the permanent revocation of a clearance, where email communication with FSN staff in good standing played a key role in a security clearance suspension.

Very soon, we are going to see a lot more FSOs lose their clearances because they maintained contact with FSNs with whom they had worked side by side for two, three or four years of their careers.

In our last posting, we mentioned the State Department's new non-fraternization policy, ehr, umm, I mean contact-reporting requirements, and questioned what would happen in the case of emails.

The fact of the matter is that if the new regulations are published as drafted, beginning this summer, all FSOs who maintain even a distant sort of email contact with former FSN colleagues from any country listed on a classified (and ever-changing) list, will have to report those emails to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Given the current trend, it is extremely likely that DS will also require FSOs who write to FSN colleagues to turn over their emails to DS for review.

Like so many other things, this represents a complete contradiction by Diplomatic Security of a stated objective of the State Department.

As the State Department seeks to empower FSN staff and stress their value as valued employees of the US Government, DS seeks to demonize them and discourage fraternization.

We really wish DS would get with the program.

The Cold War is over! We Won!

And the State Department is not the Air Force!

Get it?